It is to be presumed that any of the candidates for the Democratic nomination who calls for impeachment now or in the near future is simply trying to curry favor with the party base. Any attempt to impeach Trump would founder on GOP acquittal votes in the Senate, and work in Trump's favor, no matter how substantial the evidence against him.

The state of available evidence will require an impeachment, no matter what anyone simply tries. Mueller produced an impeachment referral. If you can't indict, you must impeach. Pelosi is correct that impeachment must be a forced move, not something Congress should be glad to do. It entails risk, and it should. Whether Repubs go along or not can't be the standard. What standard of ethics and responsibility are they setting now?

Ghost of Baron Scarpia

It seems clear enough to me. Trump finds out that Russian Interference in the election will be investigated by a special council. He says, "that's the end of my presidency, I'm f***ed." Then he takes numerous actions, some behind the scenes, some in plain sight, to put a stop to the investigation, to fire Mueller, etc. Some of his underlings advise him that the action he has ordered is illegal, they refuse to carry out his orders for fear of exposing themselves to criminal charges. Can there be a more obvious case of obstruction of justice, trying to fire the cop who is investigating you? The fact that he announced on television, in twitter, in a meeting with the Russian envoy, that he intended to obstruct justice is simply surreal. Perhaps in some people's minds it shows he had no idea he was committing a crime.

Impeachment would involve further discovery wouldn't it? Including bringing to light the fourteen cases that Mueller reffered out and from all of this creating a full narrative and clear picture. And I'd imagine they'd be at least a few bombshells in those twelve cases that are unknown.

True, if there was a vote today the Republican Senate would be kept in line, but I'd imagine the are at least some former Never-Trumpers who would be wishing for the political cover of free-falling approval numbers and ever-widening scandal that even Fox has to cover to finally be able to break ranks - especially if the end result is president Pence (who, I notice, has been keeping very quiet).

"Iowa's longest-serving Republican state lawmaker is ditching the party in a protest of what he called President Donald Trump's "unacceptable behavior" and is joining the Democrats.

State Rep. Andy McKean, a moderate from eastern Iowa whose 29 years in the legislature include stints in the House and Senate, announced his party switch at a news conference Tuesday. He called Trump "a poor example for the nation and particularly for our children" and said he'll seek re-election in 2020 as a Democrat.

"With the 2020 president election looming on the horizon, I feel as a Republican that I need to be able to support the standard bearer of our party. Unfortunately, that is not something I am able to do," McKean said Tuesday of Trump.

"He sets, in my opinion, a poor example for the nation and particularly for our children by personally insulting -- often in a crude and juvenile fashion -- those who disagree with him, being a bully at a time when we are attempting to discourage bullying, his frequent disregard for the truth and his willingness to ridicule or marginalize people for their appearance, ethnicity or disability," he said."

"In the months before Kirstjen Nielsen was forced to resign, she tried to focus the White House on one of her highest priorities as homeland security secretary: preparing for new and different Russian forms of interference in the 2020 election.

President Trump’s chief of staff told her not to bring it up in front of the president.

Ms. Nielsen left the Department of Homeland Security early this month after a tumultuous 16-month tenure and tensions with the White House. Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia’s continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections — ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.

But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.”

Even though the Department of Homeland Security has primary responsibility for civilian cyberdefense, Ms. Nielsen eventually gave up on her effort to organize a White House meeting of cabinet secretaries to coordinate a strategy to protect next year’s elections.

As a result, the issue did not gain the urgency or widespread attention that a president can command. And it meant that many Americans remain unaware of the latest versions of Russian interference."

"Deutsche Bank has begun the process of providing financial records to New York state's attorney general in response to a subpoena for documents related to loans made to President Donald Trump and his business, according to a person familiar with the production.

Last month, the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James issued subpoenas for records tied to funding for several Trump Organization projects.The state's top legal officer opened a civil probe after Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen testified to Congress in a public hearing that Trump had inflated his assets. Cohen at that time presented copies of financial statements he said had been provided to Deutsche Bank."

"No one expects Donald Trump to be a constitutional scholar — or a scholar of anything, for that matter. But one might think that the man who could become only the third president to get impeached would attempt to understand that simple process.

In a tweet Wednesday morning, Trump revealed that he hasn’t. “The Mueller Report, despite being written by Angry Democrats and Trump Haters, and with unlimited money behind it ($35,000,000), didn’t lay a glove on me. I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Trump tweeted.

The Court, of course, plays no role in the impeachment process. The Constitution says the House “shall have the sole Power of Impeachment” and the Senate “shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments,” which can be brought for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

Less than three decades ago, the Court reaffirmed the congressional duties to carry out impeachment proceedings, ruling in 1993 that the powers lie with Congress and “nowhere else.” If Trump thinks that a Supreme Court to which he has appointed two justices would let him off, he appears to be mistaken. As Brett Kavanaugh himself wrote in 2009: “If the President does something dastardly, the impeachment process is available. No single prosecutor, judge, or jury should be able to accomplish what the Constitution assigns to the Congress.”

None of this would preclude Trump from trying to tie up the issue in courts, but as attorney Joshua Matz told the Washington Post, “If the President were to seek judicial intervention in that fashion, the courts would almost certainly refuse to hear the case on the ground that it is a ‘political question’ textually entrusted to Congress by the Constitution.”

"President Donald Trump indicated in a phone call with Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar last week that the U.S. supported an assault on the country’s capital to depose its United Nations-backed government, according to American officials familiar with the matter.

An earlier call from White House National Security Adviser John Bolton also left Haftar with the impression of a U.S. green light for an offensive on Tripoli by his forces, known as the Libyan National Army, according to three diplomats."

"Theresa May has been criticised for allowing Donald Trump to make a state visit in June for D-day commemorations, with MPs orchestrating a campaign to stop the US president addressing parliament.

Labour said it “beggars belief” that the government is offering the red-carpet treatment to Trump given his attacks on British and American values. Backbenchers began gathering signatures for a petition aiming to force the cancellation of the trip."

"Special counsel Robert Mueller may be done, but President Donald Trump and his team are still adding to an already hefty record of evidence that could fuel impeachment proceedings or future criminal indictments.

Team Trump’s bellicose tweets and public statements in the last few days are potentially exposing Trump to fresh charges of witness intimidation, obstruction of justice and impeding a congressional investigation — not to mention giving lawmakers more fodder for their presidential probes — according to Democrats and legal experts.

Already, a fusillade of verbal assaults aimed at former White House counsel Don McGahn, a star witness in the Mueller report, have sparked questions about obstruction and witness intimidation as Democrats fight the Trump White House to get McGahn’s documents and testimony.

“This is risky,” said William Jeffress, a prominent Washington defense attorney who represented President Richard Nixon after he left the White House. “I find it surprising because he’s taking these shots at witnesses who gave information to Mueller, and I think he’s got to be careful because there’s an explicit federal statute punishing retaliation against witnesses.”

"The Federal Election Commission (FEC) was sued in federal court on Tuesday for allegedly failing to enforce campaign finance laws against the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Giffords, the nonprofit organization founded by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) after she survived an assassination attempt, sued the FEC for allegedly allowing the NRA to violate campaign finance law — including to help Donald Trump.

“Plaintiff’s complaints demonstrate that the National Rifle Association (“NRA”) violated the Federal Election Campaign Act by using a complex network of shell corporations to unlawfully coordinate expenditures with the campaigns of at least seven candidates for federal office, thereby making millions of dollars of illegal, unreported, and excessive in-kind contributions, including up to $25 million in illegal contributions to now President Donald J. Trump,” the lawsuit charged.

The lawsuit attempted to explain the scale of the alleged campaign finance violation.

“The illegal contributions to the Trump campaign alone are up to 9,259 times the limit set by Congress. Yet the Commission has taken no action on Plaintiff’s complaints,” the lawsuit said. “In light of this unlawful and unreasonable delay, Plaintiff files this action to compel the FEC to comply with its statutory duty to act.”

The lawsuit claims a “shell company” was created to bypass campaign finance law.

“By coordinating their advertising strategy in this manner, the NRA-PVF and the NRA-ILA have made up to $35 million in contributions to candidate campaigns since the 2014 election, in excess of the contribution limits, in violation of the source restrictions, and without the disclosure required under federal law. This includes up to $25 million in coordinated, illegal contributions to the Trump campaign in 2016,” the lawsuit argued."

"It’s safe to say that President Trump is, at best, indifferent to the system of checks and balances that gives Congress the power to oversee his administration and his presidency. Trump has regularly complained about the number of investigations initiated by Democrats since they retook control of the House in January, at times conflating those probes with the most frequent target of his frustration, the investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

The Democrats don’t seem to be particularly worried about Trump’s complaints. In recent weeks, the salvo of requests has included demanding Trump’s tax returns, requesting testimony from an official in charge of security clearances and seeking testimony from former officials cited in Mueller’s report, such as former White House counsel Don McGahn. If it’s not a full-court press, it’s getting there.

In response, Trump has dug in. The Treasury Department missed a Tuesday deadline to hand over the tax returns. The White House’s personnel security director, Carl Kline, was instructed not to respond to a subpoena. On Tuesday afternoon, The Washington Post reported that the White House planned to fight the subpoena issued to McGahn on the basis of executive privilege.

We’re just past the brink of a wide-ranging, multifront legal fight between the executive and legislative branches. To determine who’s most likely to win that fight, I spoke with Lisa Kern Griffin, a law professor at Duke University.

The core legal fights

During our conversation, Griffin outlined five areas, delineated later in this article, in which Congress and the president were likely to butt heads. But, more broadly, she explained a central advantage enjoyed by the president.

“Congress does have the power to subpoena records and testimony in order to exercise its legitimate oversight function, and it has pretty broad authority in defining what falls within those legitimate exercises of authority,” she explained.

But, she continued, “it takes time for those things to be enforced.” Subpoenas and contempt citations issued by Congress last only for the duration of that Congress — meaning that subpoenas issued now will expire when the new Congress is installed in January 2021. They can be renewed, but if, for example, Republicans retake the House, it’s fairly safe to assume they won’t be.

The White House is quite aware of the time limit on the actions taken by House Democrats.

"I think that they can slow-walk it, and that their intent is actually to try to run out the clock until the end of the Congress itself and, of course, up until the election in 2020,” Griffin said.

Part of the problem for Congress is that it lacks a robust criminal enforcement mechanism. A recent Congressional Research Service report delineated the two ways in which Congress could pressure administration officials to respond to subpoenas: criminal contempt citations or civil enforcement.

Contempt citations for ignoring subpoenas are powerful in theory, but, problematically in this moment, they rely on the Justice Department for enforcement. In the past, administrations have simply declined to prosecute those found in contempt by Congress. Often, the refusals to comply with the subpoenas in the first place have been rooted in claims of executive privilege.

That’s an important concept. The short version is that administrations can refuse to provide information by claiming that doing so would reveal details of high-level decision-making that should remain protected. If challenged, the issue would come before a judge to determine whether the information being protected deserved to be shielded by privilege.

Even if the Justice Department did prosecute someone for contempt and obtain a conviction, the result would be a misdemeanor, as Randall Eliason, former assistant U.S. attorney for the District and an adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School, explained to The Post last year.

The civil enforcement process jumps directly to the courts. Those refusing to comply with a subpoena could end up facing a daily fine until they comply. There would likely be no shortage of people willing to help cover those costs. Especially since the fines would likely only apply from the point at which the court finally ruled in the matter — rarely a quick process — until the subpoena potentially expired in early 2021.

How specific fights may be resolved

Again, though, not all of the fights Trump and Congress will be engaged in have the same legal parameters. Here are five situations that Griffin outlined in our call.

Requests for testimony under oath from administration officials

This is the situation with Kline, the official in charge of granting security clearances in the White House. Democrats want to ask Kline about the clearance granted to senior adviser Jared Kushner despite apparent concerns from security officials, among other things.

This is sort of situation that most obviously adheres to the debate outlined above. The Trump administration will assert privilege, and Congress will try to compel testimony anyway. The claim of privilege will likely be evaluated in court.

In the past, Griffin noted, both sides usually worked on a compromise short of that, determining some limited points of testimony or to agree to provide certain information. The Trump administration, though, has demonstrated little interest in even that level of compliance.

“There is no reason to go any further” than working with the probe by special counsel Mueller, Trump said in an interview with The Post, “and especially in Congress, where it’s very partisan — obviously very partisan.”

“Most of the case law on this presumes a sort of quaint world of political accommodation where parties would negotiate about which information will be divulged and which individuals will testify when,” Griffin said. “The current rules and case law are not well equipped to deal with pure, cold stonewalling, which seems to be the White House’s posture with respect to all questions or information now.”

If you’re one of those people tracking the collapse of existing norms in Washington, get out your pencil.

Requests for testimony from former officials

This situation — which applies to McGahn, among others — is trickier.

“When it comes to someone like Don McGahn or, soon enough, Robert Mueller, they are not bound by DOJ policy or by directions they’re receiving from the executive branch,” Griffin explained. “In the case of Don McGahn there may well be privilege issues, but both of those critical witnesses are effectively private citizens or will be at the time that they testify.”

The “privilege issues” to which she refers are issues of executive privilege, not attorney-client privilege. McGahn was White House counsel, but his client was the presidency, not Trump himself.

She noted, though, that executive privilege claims made by the administration (as it seems poised to do) would be iffy. After all, what House members want to discuss with McGahn is largely his testimony before Mueller’s investigators, and the existence of that testimony means that the White House has already declined to protect it as privileged.

“The issues that Congress wants to talk to Don McGahn about involve either no privilege or areas where privilege has already been waived,” she said. “So I don’t anticipate that any assertions of privilege will be meaningful with respect to Don McGahn’s testimony.”

Even if there were other subjects that Congress wanted to broach, McGahn is bound by the administration’s efforts to exert privilege only to the extent that he feels he’s professionally or ethically obliged to respect the White House’s request. Now that McGahn no longer works there, Trump’s leverage over him has evaporated.

Information about administration decision-making

This is one of the more common ways in which Congress seeks information from administrations, asking members of various government departments for information about decision-making or conversations with the White House.

Again, the White House could assert privilege, and, again, normally these requests would traditionally be resolved through negotiation. But here Congress has another tool with which to compel a response: money.

“It has appropriations powers, and sometimes it has used those to leverage information out of agencies, for example,” Griffin said. “There are mechanisms that are more clearly within the House’s control that it can use in any given power struggle over issues of this sort.”

Put simply: If the Department of Interior doesn’t want to answer questions from Congress, the House can decide it doesn’t want to fully fund the Department of the Interior.

The request for the tax returns

This is a very specific subset of the various requests that Congress has made of Trump — but also one of the highest-profile.

Congress set a deadline for Tuesday for the IRS (and its parent, the Treasury Department) to turn over Trump’s returns under a law allowing it to request returns from the agency. The administration responded that it would have a response for House committee chairmen in early May as to whether it would provide the returns at all.

Independently, Trump sued the chairman of the House Oversight Committee to try to block the release of his returns. The suit cited a Supreme Court case from 1880, but that ruling was overturned nearly a century ago.

The effort to block the returns’ release was described to The Post by experts on the legal issues as a delay tactic — one of many that’s again aimed at running out the clock.

Requests for other information from external organizations

House Democrats have also requested information from businesses that worked with Trump before he became president. That includes Deutsche Bank, for example, which provided loans to Trump in recent years.

Here, the president’s position is much weaker.

“Banks are in the habit of complying with valid subpoenas. They receive them from law enforcement all the time,” Griffin said. “I think [Democrats] are more likely to achieve cooperation with entities outside of the executive branch and issues that can’t possibly touch on executive privilege.”

Even if the White House or Trump Organization sued to block the release of information, the banks or other external organizations would have to get court permission to ignore the subpoena while waiting to determine if the information should be withheld.

“It depends on whether the banks fear litigation by the president in a civil suit more than they fear potentially defying a validly issued subpoena for financial information,” she said.

You’ll notice that most of these fights are dependent on how courts weigh in on the matter. Kicking the fights to the court has the benefit for Trump of eating up time, but it also means potentially seeing issues resolved at the highest court in the land, now controlled by a conservative majority.

“Congress can and should win eventually in the lower court,” Griffin said at one point, “but that’s not the end of the story. Some of this could go all the way up to the Supreme Court. It can move faster than ordinary cases, but it is not going to move with lightning speed.”

The state of available evidence will require an impeachment, no matter what anyone simply tries. Mueller produced an impeachment referral. If you can't indict, you must impeach. Pelosi is correct that impeachment must be a forced move, not something Congress should be glad to do. It entails risk, and it should. Whether Repubs go along or not can't be the standard. What standard of ethics and responsibility are they setting now?

The evidence justifies impeachment, but if half of the GOP Senate caucus remains more afraid of the 40% of voters who support Trump than they are of the other 60% it's a waste of time and would in the end make Trump stronger. Which may be the reason Mueller did not make an impeachment referral. He merely made a subtle hint that way.

Hearings for oversight and investigative purposes will be helpful come election time, but until the time 90% of GOP voters admit that fake news is no such thing, and that Trump is both a crook and a fool, impeachment is worthless.

The evidence justifies impeachment, but if half of the GOP Senate caucus remains more afraid of the 40% of voters who support Trump than they are of the other 60% it's a waste of time and would in the end make Trump stronger. Which may be the reason Mueller did not make an impeachment referral. He merely made a subtle hint that way.

Hearings for oversight and investigative purposes will be helpful come election time, but until the time 90% of GOP voters admit that fake news is no such thing, and that Trump is both a crook and a fool, impeachment is worthless.

Impeachment must be done. The case is too overwhelming. I predicted Trump would continue to provide grounds for impeachment continually in order to cover the tracks of his prior actions. He wouldn't stop, he can't stop, he hasn't stopped. Congress has to stop him, even if they are afraid of what will happen. They should be more afraid of what will happen if the people see they didn't even try.

"The White House has informed the House Oversight Committee that aide Stephen Miller will not testify before the panel about his role in President Donald Trump's controversial immigration policies, according to a letter obtained by CNN.

In the Wednesday letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone says there's "long-standing precedent" for the White House to decline offers for staff to testify on Capitol Hill. Instead, the White House counsel said Cabinet secretaries and other executive branch officials would make a "reasonable accommodation" for House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings' questions on immigration policy."

"After months of promises from key administration officials that an executive order was “imminent,” President Donald Trump has officially authorized the transfer of the governmentwide suitability, credentialing and security clearance portfolio from the Office of Personnel Management to the Defense Department.

The move was highly anticipated. An executive order, which Trump signed Wednesday evening, makes the transfer official.

The executive order officially renames the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service as the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA). The DCSA will serve as the primary security clearance provider for all of government, effective June 24.

[...]

The Trump administration is already considering a series of sweeping changes to suitability, credentialing and security clearance programs, as the ODNI announced in March. DoD has already been pivoting toward the use of continuous evaluation and vetting in lieu of a periodic reinvestigation every few years. Most notably, the ODNI and OPM have suggested a complete overhaul of the principles and standards that agencies currently use to determine a person’s “trust” for working in government."

Impeachment must be done. The case is too overwhelming. I predicted Trump would continue to provide grounds for impeachment continually in order to cover the tracks of his prior actions. He wouldn't stop, he can't stop, he hasn't stopped. Congress has to stop him, even if they are afraid of what will happen. They should be more afraid of what will happen if the people see they didn't even try.

If they do try, Trump will be re-elected in 2020. The more Democrats focus on impeachment, the more conservatives go tribal and see it only as a powergrab by the other side.

What Democrats need to do is focus on the issues. Show they are better than Trump on health care, on immigration, on foreign affairs in general. We don't need to repudiate Trump for a healthy America. We need to repudiate Trumpism/MAGA.

"The administration’s emerging position appears to be that Congress does not really have the power to investigate the president, at least not when one chamber is controlled by his political adversaries, even if whatever information it seeks might eventually be used in an impeachment proceeding. That’s a deeply disturbing argument, and one that, if successful, would tilt the separation of powers, perhaps irrevocably, toward the executive branch.Several fights between the administration and the House seemed to boil over this past week. The Justice Department has said the official who oversees its civil rights division won’t give a deposition to a House committee investigating the administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. The White House blocked another official, who handles security clearances, from testifying before a different panel looking into that work. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has missed deadlines to provide Trump’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which has requested them as permitted by statute; Mnuchin says he’ll decide next month whether to comply. Trump also sued the chairman of the House Oversight Committee (as well as his own accounting firm) to try to quash a subpoena the panel issued for financial information related to Trump’s businesses.

Some of this looks like a routine dispute — one for which it should be easy to predict the outcome. The Supreme Court has stressed for nearly a century that Congress possesses the “power of inquiry,” and one main form that power takes is the ability to compel participation with investigations into misconduct by the executive branch. What’s more, it is no crisis that at least some of the subpoenas are being resisted or challenged. Congress and the executive branch have tussled for as long as the legislative branch has issued subpoenas; an especially high-profile case from the mid-1980s involved Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch, whose son Neil may soon be tasked with resolving such a dispute on the Supreme Court. Nor is it a crisis that some of the subpoenas may have been issued for (perish the thought!) partisan purposes. That’s what happens in the political branches.

The real crisis is that what used to be a retail constitutional conflict has all the signs of becoming a wholesale one — with Trump telling reporters on Wednesday that “we’re fighting all the subpoenas.” Instead of following his predecessors’ lead and asserting case-specific objections to specific subpoenas (and complying with others), Trump’s approach, at least publicly, has been to attack the idea that any subpoena could be appropriate — in essence, to challenge Congress’s power of inquiry on its face."